The return of never-ending job interviews: 'It can go beyond the pale'

Interview length, structure, and sanity limits

• Many comments mock multi-round gauntlets (e.g., “baker’s dozen” interviews) as a waste of everyone’s time and a sign the company doesn’t know what it’s doing.
• Some note their best experiences were single, focused interviews; others are fine with one solid technical + “wining and dining,” but not endless rounds.
• Several see 6–7 live-coding sessions for a senior candidate as insulting and redundant.

Candidate time, cost, and leverage

• Interviewing is framed as financially and emotionally costly: PTO burned, unpaid travel, lost job search time, and family time.
• People object to companies treating candidate time as free, regardless of employment status.
• Anecdotes: using onsite interviews as “revenge” to waste a big company’s resources; leveraging another offer to bypass a temp period; walking away from months-long processes.

Greed, motivation, and hoop-jumping

• One view: if the process is excessively long, those who stay to the end are either extremely greedy or desperate.
• Pushback: wanting a better job or being willing to jump through hoops isn’t inherently greedy; many just need income and stability.
• Some suggest extreme filters risk selecting for the wrong traits (e.g., people who will “do anything for money”), but others call this speculative and ungrounded.

Employer indecision, ghost jobs, and risk aversion

• Four-month timelines to offers are criticized as indecision, inefficiency, or a way to lowball candidates, and as a filter for mediocrity.
• Comparisons are made to dating apps: employers hold off committing in case “someone better” appears.
• Several mention “ghost jobs” and roles that are perpetually open, apparently in search of the mythical top 0.1% candidate or to keep a budget line alive.
• Others stress that hiring is genuinely hard and that a bad developer can be more damaging than an unfilled role, so some caution is rational.

Process variants and specific practices

• Positive example: short take-home project plus one team-fit conversation, with feedback, seen as vastly better than multiple leetcode rounds.
• Negative examples: extremely heavy leetcode pipelines (e.g., weeks of prep + many coding rounds) and repeated re-application for government/seasonal roles.

Market and broader reflections

• Some argue big tech’s bureaucracy and cost-cutting create bloated, slow hiring, and that smaller firms can win talent by moving faster.
• A few note this is part of a longer-term cycle of dominant firms stagnating while new companies emerge.

Language tangent: “beyond the pale”

• Side debate over whether the phrase is inherently pro-colonialist.
• The cited source is argued to contradict that claim; others say etymology doesn’t fix present meaning, while some see the concern as overblown or “woke.”